Seoul (AsiaNews/Agencies) – Pyongyang says it is nullifying the 1953 war armistice with Seoul and warned of an immediate military strike after the South Korean decision to participate in the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), an initiative of former US president George Bush to stop the transfer of nuclear weapons technologies.
Tensions are high on the peninsula: this week the North has test fired short-range missiles and exploded a nuclear bomb equal to 20 kilotons underground, it has opened the nuclear plant at Yongbyon and says it can’t claim “the security of ships travelling off the west coast”.
In a statement released by the Korean Central News Agency (Kcna), Pyongyang underlines that “the Korean Peninsula has returned to the state of war” adding that “our army no longer feels bound by the armistice”. The North was spurred on to this decision by the South’s participation in an initiative first started in 2003 by George Bush to stop the transfer of nuclear weapons technologies (Psi). Pyongyang says it considers the inspection of cargo on ships bound for the North “an act of war”.
An informed source meanwhile says North Korea has restarted its nuclear reprocessing facility at Yongbyon from mid-April to produce plutonium used in nuclear warheads. The Yongbyon facility had been undergoing a disablement process under an aid-for-denuclearization deal signed in 2007. Pyongyang said in April that it will restart the nuclear facility, reacting to a U.N. Security Council statement that condemned its long-range rocket launch earlier that month. Pyongyang is believed to have already stockpiled enough plutonium to make as many as half a dozen nuclear weapons.
Analysts believe that Kim Jong-il’s latest show of force is in reality a front to force greater economic and political concessions from the International Community. North Korea needs electricity and food, over the past ten years it has been devastated by famine and still today its people are dependent on food aid.